That means there's libre-free software and a service provided by a non-distro company which is, for selected distros, gratis-free. For now.
I like your Latin-based distinction of "free" better than the free-as-in-beer v.s. free-as-in-speech method. I'll have to remember it for the next time I give a speech on OSS at the Roman senate.
Libre is French. The Latin equivalent is liber.
I'm not sure if you're referring to US history, but the "protection" that unions got only came later. The original unions only had the threat to walk off as "protection".
I said that. In those cases, I don't object to unions much or at all. However, that's not the status quo today, contrary to what you implied. Unions today are protected by the government far beyond what free trade would give them.
Why should corporations exist with "legal protection" if unions should not? What do you think patents are? What do you think copyrights are? What do you think contract law is all about? You live in some Cato Foundation fantasy world where you honestly believe you could survive for 2 days without "legal protection". You probably also believe that your "success" and "wealth" exist only due to your hard work and talent and the government only holds you back, right?
I'm not a laissez-faire capitalist, nor a libertarian. I'm in favor of government regulation to help the poor and achieve other social goals. I also agree that unions were important historically in improving the standard of living in America, if only because of the lack of other options. However, I don't think most unions are good for society at large today, and I think government protection of unions should end.
I'm not about to get into an argument about why I think all this, particularly not on Slashdot. I only posted to object to your implication that collective bargaining as we know it today is the result of a free market. It's the regulations prohibiting the employer from firing union members that require them to negotiate. Otherwise most unions would be destroyed pretty quickly.
What you want is a return to the days when all the power is in the hands of the employers. It sounds like you're some free-market religious fanatic or something, and I'm not sure why I even took the time to respond. When you can find a single case in human history when a "free market" existed and made anything better for anyone, then you can be taken seriously.
You were the one who first mentioned free markets, not me. You were trying to paint today's teachers' unions as the product of a free market (or at least that's how I read "Should they not be allowed to negotiate their best pay package? Don't you trust free markets?" in your post). I never said I supported totally free markets, and I don't.
Hate to play devil's advocate here, but cartels are not (usually) legally protected, and legally the board of a company can hire whatever CEO they want. Unions, however, are legally protected entities. It would be a bit nuts to fire all the teachers and hire new people, but the law is there because some employers would do it if they could.
It's not nuts at all: it's the only way to break a union. It's how Reagan destroyed the air traffic controller union, for example. I also recall reading years ago that when a Canadian Wal-Mart's employees tried to unionize, Wal-Mart couldn't fire or otherwise penalize them under local law, so instead they simply shut down that store.
I'd go so far as to say that firing people is the standard response to a strike, where it's legal. The employer is hurt, but the union members are hurt far more – so the next batch knows to never try that again. If firing people for job actions were legal (they're deliberately not doing their job . .
By the way, don't you believe teachers should have the right to collectively bargain? Should they not be allowed to negotiate their best pay package? Don't you trust free markets?
Sure I do. In a free market, an employer would be able to fire anyone immediately as soon as they so much as joined a union, let alone took any job action. But doing that is generally illegal, and that's the sole reason most unions can exist today. If a union can exist without legal protection (as was often the case in the 1800s and early 1900s), I'm not necessarily against it.
You can retest several times if you plan ahead.
But then all your grades get sent to the school, right?
Because solid state's main hold back has always been capacity.
SSDs have plenty of capacity. The problem is price per unit capacity. You can get 1 TB SSDs . . . they just cost over $3000. (But one of them claims 1.4 GB/s read/write speeds. Nice.)
The list of supported codecs in Firefox for is hardcoded and can't be changed by plugins, by design. (Maybe if they were invasive enough they could do some horrible hack, I don't know, but I wouldn't bet on it.)
On chrome it might be difficult to change but Firefox lets you rewrite the page before it renders. Further, since it's HTML, you can rewrite it with userjs through the DOM even AFTER it renders. Consequently you ought to be able to simply turn video tags into embed tags and pass them off to a plugin.
True, but you're not going to get the same experience as an actual native <video> implementation. You might be able to implement the HTML5 video APIs, but that would take work. You'd also have a hard time making it work correctly with CSS, etc. You could only do an ugly hack this way, not a proper implementation. So I think it's more likely that sites will just encode to both VP8 and H.264 rather than try to hack something like this up for Firefox.
But I'm not clear as to what "the odds that the two input probabilities match" means... that implies, to me, that it returns a 1 if the inputs are identical and 0 if not. I'm thinking it instead means, "Given events A and B with inputs p(A) and p(B), Bayesian NAND represents p(A and B)." Or perhaps p(A nand B)... I don't know.
It's not possible to compute p(A and B) from just p(A) and p(B). You need other information, like p(A|B) or p(B|A). For example, flip two coins, X and Y. If A = "X is heads", B = "Y is heads", then p(A) = 1/2, p(B) = 1/2, p(A and B) = 1/4. If A = "X is heads", B = "X is tails", then p(A) = 1/2, p(B) = 1/2, p(A and B) = 0. So the gate couldn't possibly mean either of those things.
H.264 will be solved on Firefox with a plugin whether it's official or not.
The list of supported codecs in Firefox for <video> is hardcoded and can't be changed by plugins, by design. (Maybe if they were invasive enough they could do some horrible hack, I don't know, but I wouldn't bet on it.)
I hope you realized that the UI and extensions of firefox are written in Javascript, when you complain those speed issues, most of them are somewhat related with speed of javascript.
Unlikely. Interface lag is going to be caused by too much stuff being done on the thread that renders the interface. IIRC, Chrome was written from the beginning with a dedicated interface thread that did no blocking syscalls or other real work. Thus it usually responds instantly to input, no matter what you're doing. One of the performance improvements they're doing in Firefox 4 is moving stuff off the interface thread, so that the interface feels snappier. The kinds of computations that are sped up by the JaegerMonkey work are almost certain to be irrelevant to Firefox's responsiveness.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a browser implementer, so possibly I don't know what I'm talking about.)
Going to be difficult for all those billions of LAM(ysql)P users until they gets a better way of storing them.
Apparently support for ipv6 is "Status: On-Hold - Priority: Low". So it looks like we're all going to have to migrate to LAP(ostgres)P.
Or just store them in strings, which is what the MySQL software I know about does for IPv4 anyway. Just make the string field a bit longer.
You may well be right. I hope you are. However, five years is an eternity in Internet time.
True. But I'm just talking about when Flash is practically extinct. It's already on the way down, and HTML5 is already close to an acceptable replacement for some basic use-cases. I'd bet on top-tier video sites switching to HTML5 by default on some platforms in less than two years (they already support HTML5 as an option). Obviously there will be no massive change in the next six months – that's only practical when the client and server are controlled by the same party.
To check your perspective, please try to identify any top tier web-based business today that is still using the same core technologies as it was five years ago.
I'm not familiar with many top-tier websites, but the one I am familiar with is Wikipedia. That still runs on MediaWiki on top of LAMP behind Squid, pretty much the same as five years ago, although with a number of fairly significant improvements across the board. Most of the others are so secretive that it's hard to say, unless the site actually didn't exist five years ago. Regardless, your general point is correct.
No, but they're still standardized. Standardization is just when the exact way to do something is written down in a central and agreed-upon place. Editor's Drafts are standards. You can even have standards that aren't written down in any special place at all, like rel="nofollow". You might call some of these de facto standards rather than proper "official" standards, but they're still standards. To reach W3C Recommendation, every single feature of a document (which is often very large) must have two independent implementations and often a full test suite. Most of the individual features may well have been standardized years before.
In any case, for real projects rather than exploratory or for-fun pages, it is what's implemented that counts. There's no rule that we can't change a project to use a better technology later if one is available, but it's pretty hard to run a successful project using a better technology that most users don't have yet.
Yep, sure. It's standardized, but as I said, it's not implemented. The distinction is important, since a lot of random Slashdotters seem to blame the W3C for slow standards progress. In fact, in core web technologies like CSS and HTML5, it's the implementers who are usually the bottleneck, since writing a spec is typically quicker than coding the feature.
Did you see the video of that Quake 2? It has major frame rate drops (and I doubt it was running on specs from 5 years ago) and took many elements beyond html5 to do that (in their words "we use WebGL, the Canvas API, HTML 5 elements, the local storage API, and WebSockets"). So many extras means more problems to support on different OS's.
All of the technologies you list are part of "HTML5" in the broad sense. "HTML5" colloquially means "all recent standards-based additions to the web platform". They're all supported more or less interoperably by different browsers on different OSes, although not all of them are finalized yet (for example, WebSockets isn't fully stable).
Now go try Quake Live which is running Flash.
As other people pointed out, it's not Flash, it's its own plugin. So you're comparing HTML5 to native code. Yeah, no kidding, native code will be faster than JavaScript. But it has all sorts of other problems: it's insecure, it's harder to install, it only works on specific platforms.
Now are you really trying to tell me that [etc., etc.] is the proof that Flash is dying and ready to be replaced by the standard HTML5?
Flash is not dying quickly, it's dying slowly. It's not going to be replaced right now: IE is too much of a problem. Give it a few years and we'll see.
The basic problem is that while it's easy to criticise Flash, the available alternatives simply aren't up to the job yet, nor are they going to be any time soon.
Depends what you mean by "soon". I predict less than five years until Flash is no longer widely used except as fallback or for niche features.
If you're a fan of open, portable standards and advocate HTML5 and CSS over Flash, please remember how much of HTML5 and CSS3 isn't actually standardised yet. Most of these clever demo pages are based on non-portable, browser-specific CSS, which looks similar to what might one day go in CSS3 but often varies subtly between rendering engines, so the CSS files are full of almost the same styling written in three not-quite-identical ways.
Really? Give examples of this, please. In CSS you sometimes have to state the same exact rule three times or more, but it's the same rule with the same syntax in all common cases I can think of except gradients. HTML5 video/canvas generally don't require many cross-browser hacks. You just have to stick to what all browsers have implemented. Libraries like jQuery can also abstract away browser differences for you.
In fact, this stuff is generally standardized already. The problem is it's not always implemented, and when it is, often it's only in newer browsers. So HTML5 will take time to win, but it will win, at least for the common cases. Plugins might always be needed for special functionality that's too narrow to standardize, but not for basic video viewing, browser games, etc.
Of course, Oracle controls btrfs as well, and its future doesn't exactly look so great at this point, either
Oracle doesn't control btrfs. It's part of the Linux kernel. Oracle pays the one who's currently in charge of btrfs development, Chris Mason, but a) someone else could take over if he left (look at how many developers there are); and b) plenty of other companies would be willing to hire him if Oracle didn't want to pay him to work on btrfs anymore. Oracle has influence over btrfs, but not control.
"Money is the root of all money." -- the moving finger
